Dear Game Industry: Please appreciate your employees.

Dear Game Industry 👋 Please appreciate your employees.

As an industry, you’re in the enviable position of having an abundance of skilled and qualified people passionate about building what you sell.

Please don’t abuse it.

Are unions the answer?

It doesn’t have to go the way of the movie business a hundred years ago.

You’re more akin to the software industry than the movie industry. You have products with longevity. That’s why 60% of playtime is spent on games that are 6+ years old and only 8% on truly new titles.

Think products, not projects, and treat your employees well. You’ll never have to worry about unions again.

It’s so easy and a win-win for everyone. (And 👏 to studios already doing these things 🙌)

-> End the hire/fire cycles – You lose valuable studio-specific knowledge every time this happens, not to mention the havoc it wreaks on people’s lives.

-> Let them work remotely – Any perceived face-to-face productivity gains (highly suspect due to the distraction factor alone) are not worth the constant upheaval of families moving from one expensive city to another. Plus, you don’t have to maintain costly physical studios. Plus, you’ll have access to an even broader talent pool with much greater diversity. Trust your people, and amazing things will happen.

-> Keep teams intact – Moving team members from title to title to constantly fill resource holes across multiple studios kills high-performing teams that have had the time to gel and learn to trust one another.

-> Stop crunch – It’s become accepted in the industry, and that’s just sad. Adopt proven product development practices from other industries that don’t require crunch, and you’ll end up with better products with much higher success rates.

-> End the toxic workplace – The game industry is too mature to be acting this immature. Hire, promote, and train servant leaders who understand how to create positive, open, trusting, and inclusive cultures.

-> Foster continuous learning and development – Make them so good that it would be easy to leave, but they feel so appreciated that they don’t want to.

-> Improved production practices—Producers shouldn’t be project managers with different titles. Empower the teams—freeing producers to focus on quality and build the right things at the right time, reducing waste.

-> Move toward publisher and studio-wide agility – Phase gate development is dead. Well, it’s not, but it should be.

Swen Vincke said it best at this year’s Game Developers Choice Awards. “Slow down on the greed… Take care of the people.”

Unions might be a solution, but only as a last resort.

It’s not too late game industry.

Evolve to be the product-based, stable, and fun place-to-work industry you should be.

Appreciate what you have.

Treat your people well.

Everyone wins: the publishers, the developers, and the players.